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Newly released videotapes show a pleasant and co-operative Ashley Smith despite mistreatment

Ashley Smith is shown as she's being duct-taped to her seat on an airplane during a transfer from a Saskatoon prison on April 12, 2007 in this image made from video. The haunting protests of a now dead teenager filled a coroner's courtroom Wednesday as surveillance videos were screened showing the troubled inmate repeatedly tranquilized against her will or being threatened with having her face duct-taped.Photo: Handout/Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario/The Canadian Press

How curious that it isn’t the roughness of Ashley Smith’s treatment within the federal prison system that is so striking, but rather her own unbreakable, even determinedly sunny, response to it.

A compilation of the videotapes documenting part of the teenager’s voyage within the institutions of the Correctional Service of Canada was finally played in the Ontario coroner’s court here Wednesday.

Smith died Oct. 19, 2007, in her segregation cell at the Grand Valley Institute for Women in Kitchener, Ont., one of 17 such institutions she had been shifted among during less than a year.

She was just 19.

She was long in the habit of “tying up” or putting makeshift ligatures around her neck, but no guards came to her rescue on time.

The tapes themselves have been the object of a years-long battle in various courts, with Julian Falconer, the lawyer for Smith’s family, and others fighting to have them shown, and the CSC objecting at every turn.

After the CSC failed last week in Divisional Court to have the playing of the tapes stalled yet again, Falconer was at last able to have the compilation played in open court.

This happened on a motions hearing before presiding coroner Dr. John Carlisle.

Lawyers for the CSC and a group of doctors involved in her care are arguing that Dr. Carlisle will exceed his jurisdiction if the inquest examines Smith’s treatment outside Ontario and does not stick narrowly to the days before her death.

Falconer and the others, including the correctional officers’ union, want the coroner to keep the inquest parameters broad.

About 30 minutes long, the compilation shows Smith’s treatment on three days in the months before her death — once during an April 12, 2007, flight between a psychiatric facility in Saskatoon and another in Montreal and on two days in July that year at the Joliette Institution in Joliette, Que.

In the former, Smith was strapped into her airplane seat as four CSC officers and one RCMP officer (the co-pilot of the plane) proceeded to secure her even further.

They put two so-called “spit hoods” — fabric on one side, mesh over the face — over her head and knotted them. “’Are (the two nets) so that she can breathe?’ one of the male guards asked at one point. Two females replied in unison, ‘Yes.’”

“Let me go!” Smith cried in her high child’s voice. “OK I won’t …”

The guards explained, sometimes in French, which Smith appeared to understand, that she had to “prove” that she would be calm — though she wasn’t resisting.

The shackles the guards had with them were, one of them complained, “too big for her hands,” and she could get out of her handcuffs, presumably for the same reason.

The guards then had a bit of a chuckle when, as one of them remarked, “I think that she took a dump” and complained about the smell.

“You can’t not let me go to the bathroom,” Smith said.

The tape shows she offered virtually no resistance, yet suddenly, the co-pilot appeared on the scene with a roll of grey duct tape.

He instructed the guards to put Smith’s hands together, and then bound them up with the duct tape.

Inexplicably, he then said, “Don’t bite me.”

“I’m not!” Smith protested, and indeed it appeared she couldn’t have bitten anyone.

“It will get worse if you do,” the co-pilot said.

“How can it get worse?” Smith asked.

“I’ll duct tape your face,” he replied.

“I’m not fooling around,” he said. “We’re at 33,000 feet. I’m not taking any risk. Do I make myself clear?”

What is bewildering about the entire exchange is that Smith appeared to be pleasant and co-operative — once, as the guards were putting on the second spit hood, she could be seen smiling at them — yet her handlers carried on as though they had in their charge a 370-pound violent psychopath.

The same disconnect between Smith’s passive, even agreeable, behaviour and how the guards treated her was evident in part of the tapes from July 22 and July 26, 2007, at Joliette.

On both days, she was repeatedly injected with anti-psychotics.

The first round was sparked by Smith having tried, while in her cell, to obstruct the camera; she then dismantled a wall fixture and cut herself, apparently by accident.

She was pepper-sprayed to subdue her, “de-contaminated,” and ended up in the prison infirmary on a narrow gurney.

Into the small room came a great group of guards from the prison’s emergency response team and nurses, all wearing gloves, face shields, gas masks and carrying clear plastic shields — as many as eight, perhaps more.

The person in charge was a grim prison nurse named Melanie, who barked out commands in French. Her sole act of anything resembling traditional “nursing” was to take Smith’s blood pressure and oxygen saturation levels.

Smith was lying quietly on her gurney. Her legs were in shackles, and her arms strapped down; all she could do was lift her head a little.
“Stop hurting me!” she cried once. Another time, she said, “You are hurting me, and she’s pulling my hair.”

Nurse Melanie explained the injection “will help her calm down and help her relax”; said repeatedly that she had another injection at the ready if Smith “got an arm out” of her bindings or moved around, and once complained she was showing a bad “attitude.”

Yet Smith was already calm and relaxed, and except for her occasional verbal complaints about being hurt, appeared not to move and indeed to be incapable of moving beyond trying, in vain, to sit up.

Certainly, when at one point one of the black-garbed guards, who already had his plastic shield covering Smith’s shins and lower limbs, jumped up and kneeled on her, the teen couldn’t have moved.

Five times in about a seven-hour period Smith was injected.

The situation was even more bizarre early on the morning of July 26, when, in preparation for yet another transfer to another institution, Smith was wakened from sleep.

Clearly drowsy, smiling, she stood to greet Nurse Melanie and the guards, almost as a hostess would have done at a party.

“It’s just to relax you, Ashley,” the nurse said, as though that made any sense.

Melanie injected her in one arm, then the other. Smith smiled throughout, and offered not an ounce of resistance. As one of the guards remarked in admiration, “She’s tough.”

She was too, just not tough enough.

Though the inquest proper won’t begin until the new year, it resumes for more motions next month.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile